


morning glories

by kay_cricketed



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Body Modification, F/M, M/M, Multi, Wingfic, implied wing mutilation or violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-24
Updated: 2017-12-24
Packaged: 2019-02-19 13:40:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13124892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kay_cricketed/pseuds/kay_cricketed
Summary: At thirteen, his wings are a massive, overbearing presence.  They tower above his head, tickling his ears.  The tips of his primaries drag when he walks unless he keeps perfect posture and his chin high.  They are handsome beasts of burden: deep slate with the soft promise of egg cream and pink on his scapulars.  And oh, how they can catch the wind up.Flight may be impossible, but Illya feels the power braced behind him and doubts everything he's been taught.  His heels have already left the ground.(He forgets there are ways to tether soldiers who become a flight risk.)





	morning glories

**i.**

 

His mother tells him the story of how he is born: emerging thirteen days after she dreams him, milky vernix clumped behind his ears, a warble. The midwife is called to the house, and his father is away on Central Committee business. When the midwife arrives, Illya is already crowning.

He is a muted infant, but his feet kick and his toes curl. The prickly stubs on his back are warm and flinch to the touch. "They're unusually large," says the midwife. "Don't let your husband see him for a fortnight. Don't let anyone but your husband see him for forty and one days." She helps hold Illya to his mother's breast to feed.

"Why?" his mother asks, spellbound. "He's beautiful." She strokes her thumb over his eyelid, the gold fringe of his lashes. "I will live to be one hundred now. I will never feel hunger again." She laughs wetly.

The midwife closes the windows before she leaves, although the summer is sweet and the sun hangs low in its noose. Illya sleeps in the cradle of his mother's arm, pillowed on goose down and money that is already not their own.

 

**ii.**

 

The water ripples in the pond, a shiver from the ducklings crossing its breadth. Illya is only aware of them on his periphery—his focus remains on Solo, unwilling to give an inch. The last time he looked away from this man, he had been humiliated and left in the middle of a mine field for the Germans to fish out. Illya is not someone who makes the same mistake twice. The table between them is pockmarked with the appearance of breakfast: a croissant on a saucer, coffee going cold, milk with a skinny film over its surface.

_Get to know your partner_ , they'd said. _Neither of you has a dust jacket that's exactly forthcoming._

"You aren't roasting in that?" Solo asks, indicating Illya's coat. "I saw something of the shadow of your wingspan last night. Seems like a cruel and unusual exercise to strap yourself."

Illya says, "Some of us have no need to flaunt."

Solo tilts his head and smiles in a peculiar way. The feathers at his back lift slightly, as if shrugging.

It does not surprise Illya to see Solo's wings in the daylight—the shine of more subtle colors beneath the glossy black, like motor oil reflecting from the pavement, gives them a curious collective appearance. That the wings resemble a violet shag is suitable ( _he wears his greed like a war medal, pins it on his spine_ ). The glean of green and purple changes with his movements, each feather neatly and precisely cleaned, down trimmed, impeccable, a vain marking of his character. The only thing that gives Illya pause is that they are _common_ —not the signature of good breeding—but Solo seems, in mind and body, perfectly at ease with showing them off. His suit is bespoke; it complements the stylish tuck of his plumage. He has found other ways to stand out.

Illya's back is coated in sweat. It is too warm for the coat. It will ever be too warm for the coat. He will not give Solo the pleasure of seeing him strip it.

He can remember how Solo's primaries felt as they fluttered wildly against his cheek. He shouldn't have gotten close in the bathroom—should have kept his distance and killed him without making it personal. It's all right. Illya compartmentalizes. Everything goes into thick-walled boxes, too heavy and enduring to break.

"I have of course read your file," Illya tells him, and he has learned how to be polite and cold and patronizing from his mother. _For protection_ , she'd said, _better than heather._ "You are a criminal. They say you are the best, but here you are."

"Here I am?" Solo asks.

"Clipped," says Illya. "Leashed to their wrist."

Solo's smile becomes fixed. He looks down at his hands, not ashamed but considering them as if he's never seen them before. He leans forward and says, with the hush of a secret, "The fact of the matter is, what you've done is unprecedented. In less than three years, you managed to secure a position as the KGB's top agent." His teeth are white, like birch. "Enlighten me. Is it because of your father's shame—that nasty business with Stalin and the _missing funds_ —or because deep down, you've always taken pleasure in snapping hollow bones?"

The world goes quiet in these moments, muffling out all chatter and noise until it shifts against his barriers with the sting of broken glass. Illya stares at Solo and thinks about slamming his nose into the table until it bursts open red; he thinks about ripping handfuls of black soft out, about cracking him open like a chicken's carcass. The need is sour and sick. He grips the table to keep himself grounded.

"Or maybe," says Solo, "we don't have to look any further than your rather popular mother. A real swan, they say."

The ducklings scatter in frantic lines as the table upends into the pond.

"Huh," Solo says, flexing his fingers around the space where his coffee had been, "the dossier was right. You _are_ psychotic."

 

**iii.**

 

Illya produces so much down, his mother scarcely needs to swaddle him as he sleeps. He is warm and protected, and he keeps his ears out of the cold by hunching his shoulders. By the time the cottony speckles begin to shed, and his wings come in proper-like, Illya is wracked by the chill of the real world and then by severe growing pains. His limbs cramp and all the moving and not-moving parts of him ache in symphony.

Despite this, he is a happy child. Their lives are secluded and luxurious. Other children ply at his nerves, which makes him angry. Illya does not enjoy the complexity of such emotions, so he spends as much time in his own home as he's able. He learns which games only need a willing set of lungs and knees.

His mother combs his wings with her own care kit, cleaning the dust and grime of play away in loving strokes. Illya falls asleep to her careful hum, and sometimes he wakes up to see his father staring at them from the bedroom door, unreadable, coming no closer than it takes to inform them that an official may join the family for dinner. The love of his parents is dissimilar but undoubted; though his father never touches Illya's wings, he puts his hand on Illya's head when speaking to him. He brings Illya books and teaches him chess.

Bishops, he tells Illya, and rooks and kings are all playing false faces. Only the pawns know how to take back what you once had. It is a taking that harms no one and nothing.

When they come for him—and they do come—in the cloak of nightfall, in rows of ravens and red-winged blackbirds—Illya's mother puts him in the bathtub and says, "Keep your head down. Keep your hands over your ears."

She does not go to help his father. She stays with him, crouched beside the tub, wings flared and a kitchen knife in her grip. 

 

**iv.**

 

Gaby Teller is supposed to be a mission, or the means to completing one, maybe a little dim, maybe an albatross. She is none of these things. She is a small woman with dark eyes and steel beneath her beauty—not the polish of chrome, but dull with work and weaponized. Her strength is so complete that Illya is taken aback—he thinks for a moment of his mother, but compact, and is already attached—which Solo seems to immediately sense. It's like watching a housecat circle a mouse, the way Solo stalks after him.

Illya retreats behind bravado and the comfort of knowing his belts from his purses. _Matching_ , what is wrong with Americans? Capitalism has gone to their heads. Gaby Teller deserves better than to be stuck in one color and ribbed pantyhose. If she can roll her eyes at the man who shot her off the road, she can wear all the color she wants and show off as much skin as is decent.

He chooses dresses with open backs: room to air her soapstone gray wings, dotted with tufts of white and brown. They are as tiny as the rest of her, but they sit stiff and at attention like a warning, spread out across her shoulders blades to cut out from either side of her.

Aviator wings, Solo calls them.

"Why only the open-backed dresses?" he asks Illya, eyebrows raised. "Most Eastern European women hide their wings. It's a fashionable tease, you know. Winds a man up." He looks pointedly at Illya's lumpy coat. Then, he smiles. "Or do you already like her that much?"

Illya hears the march in his ears, the beat of a flock. He grits his teeth and ignores Solo for his own sanity.

"I'm a little jealous," says Solo. "You didn't exactly give me the same chance to win you over."

"You had a chance," Illya says. "You failed. You lost it."

Solo appears to give that serious consideration. He seems _disappointed_ , but then he is the best at what he does and what he does involves considerable amounts of lying and deceit.

"Hold these," Illya tells him, shoving a wad of dresses still on their hangers into his arms. "No, on second thought, get them out of my sight. They are eyesores."

Solo looks at the women standing by, watching them, keeping a careful distance. He looks at Illya. His shoulders and wings twitch.

Pushing out from the dressing room in a flourish, Gaby regards them. Her heels sink into the plush carpet. Her dress is orange and white and green, and Illya flushes up to his ears, feels hot cinders gather in his belly. Her display is—aggressive. Before, she had pushed herself out there with her raised chin and sharp smoky words, but now she cannot be stopped.

"Huh," says Solo.

 

**v.**

 

"I will tell you about the Spanish Steps," says his mother, hunched around him in the brass-framed bed. Her wing curls over his body, keeping the heat trapped in a pocket that Illya is beginning to outgrow.

He does not seem to _stop_ growing. His socks shrink, his pants ride up his calves, the shoes he bought with his candy money last month no longer fit him. Illya is angry. He is angry at his clothes that no longer suit him, and at the flaked paisley walls of their new apartment over the butcher, and at the squash-nosed men who come by to reassure his mother _all will be well_ and drink her tea. Illya wishes fiercely, too fiercely to settle in his own skin, that they would close the windows and lock the doors and never leave the bed. He could listen to his mother tell him stories for an age.

And she tells him so many: matchstick girls and sociopolitical quagmire and how to cut carrots and Anton Chekhov's _The Cherry Orchard_.

"Where are the Spanish Steps?" he asks, eyelids drooping. "Spain?"

"They're in Rome," she says, wistful. "I saw them once with your father. Italy is made of layers, Illya, old buried beneath the new, and the steps traverse those layers to bring them together."

"Were they built by a Russian?" Illya asks hopefully. He loves it most when the stories are about Russians, whom Illya could best someday at the wonderful things they did.

"Hmm," says his mother, "how did you know? My clever son. Of course, that's not what the history books say. But in fact, the Spanish Steps were built by a man named Sergei Ivanov to commemorate his mother. He cared for her so deeply, he built one step to remember each year of her life."

The draft wiggles its way into their safe haven and Illya shivers. He tries to imagine anywhere but here: a long majestic stretch of marble under the moonlight, a foreign wind. "Why couldn't he take us both there?" Illya whispers, and beneath his mother's pulse he can hear the stamp of feet. "Why couldn't we go now?"

"Illya," she sighs into his hair.

"I don't understand."

"There will come a day when you love someone," she tells him, "more than you love the sun warm in your hair, more than you love dignity. The things you're willing to give up for that someone will frighten you. Do not be afraid, Illya. It is a strength, not a failing.”

Illya tries to be brave, as she asks. He does his best to ignore the scrappy meals and taunts of the neighboring children, the way they spit at him. He pretends he does not notice the men who come and leave, each time lingering a little longer, touching his mother's arm a second more. She entertains them with abandon, laughing too loudly, drinking too fast, bringing the past to life. But then she sends them away, and it is only Illya and his mother, and her face clears as fog from a window, her eyes as blue as his own, the lines eroding her smile as the sea wears down the bluff.

The more he pulls his fury inward, the deeper it goes. It tunnels through his veins and poisons the groundwater. By the time Illya is old enough to recognize the danger, it has a chokehold on his heart.

 

**vi.**

 

The Spanish Steps are designed by the architects Francesco de Sanctis and Alessandro Specchi. When he is fourteen, and his mother is not long dead, Illya reads about the monument while testing his Italian.

When Gaby asks him to prove himself in Rome, Illya opens his mouth and tells her the truth. 

She flays him, of course. In sparse words, she cuts down his ability to tell up from under, balancing on the Trevi Fountain in her heels. She cups her hand and drinks, her wings stretching high to distribute her weight.

Illya—for the span of a swallow—wants to perch above her and steal a kiss. Never before has he wanted to do this for a woman.

He looks up at the moon trying to hide behind the terra cotta rooftops. "I suppose, it is only a nice story," he says. "Don't worry. I will be a convincing fiancé. That is as important as being a convincing architect. I will do my job well."

"At least you are a very convincing Russian," says Gaby.

 

**vii.**

 

He meets Oleg when he is twelve, nearly a week after Illya cracks a rock into another boy's head for calling his father cruel names—the games of little boys, each one desperate to find the well of blood beneath each other's brittle gossamer skin—and it is not this act that brings Oleg, but perhaps its immediate aftermath, in which Illya ruthlessly covers his tracks and cannot be caught in a lie. They accuse and threaten and shake him, but Illya is very careful. He scrubs beneath his fingernails. He pitches his voice low and somber, the register of goodness. He builds stories like stairs. The boy is stitched up, and will live to discover new methods of breaking men.

(It isn't that Illya doesn't regret what he's done—he does. He had been angry, so angry. He could not see anything but the shape of the boy's mouth and yellow teeth and a tiny sweet freckle on his chin.)

He had not touched his wings.

"Why didn't you?" asks Oleg. "It's the weakest point of the body. Bigger target than the eyes. That rock could've done something a whole lot worse, and permanent, if you'd aimed a little lower."

"My son is a good boy," says his mother. She is pale and sickly and still reads stories to Illya even though he does not believe in them anymore. Beneath the table, he takes her hand and presses.

"I am," says Illya. He looks Oleg straight in the eye and has no fear in him, only a welded ball of iron that grates against his esophagus. "I take care of my mother."

Oleg smiles and blows smoke into his face. "I'm sure you do."

Illya stares him down. He does not say: Where is there any relief in breaking something easily? Instead, he tastes the acrid ash behind his molars and waits. 

"Your son is relentless," Oleg says in tempered admiration. "He's big and intelligent, and he has the makings of a man who will find himself in hard places without proper supervision."

"He's just a boy," says his mother. Her terror is as fine as a needle to Illya's chest. "He has time to discover how to control his temper. He's gentle, and loving—"

"You misunderstand. I'm not here to get little Illya in trouble."

No, Oleg is here to recruit. And Illya listens.

 

**viii.**

 

They stroll the ruins in the low-lying dark, the clip of Gaby's heels a strange echo of his own. Although he has never seen the ruins before, Illya spares them no attention beyond that which is required for his cover. His focus remains on the magpies following them and tapping their teeth together in anticipation. It is only a matter of time before he must—as Solo said, with that stupid smug look on his face—be a pussy.

It is not right. But Gaby and Solo, the two of them, put up a strong front. He must earn something like their trust for this mission and they are not, he has to admit, _entirely_ wrong. Only—burdened with a wealth of things they will not miss.

"So tell me," says Gaby, her attempt at dulcet lukewarm at best, "what does my fiancé like to do with his spare time?"

Illya is about to reprimand her, but he reconsiders. The men following them are lingering too far back to overhear more than the height of their consonants. "He reads and enjoys his solitude," he says.

"His social activities?"

"Most people are kind but fleeting in his life. He is a man who will take two drinks and leave for bed with a smile. Successful, but never memorable."

"Oh," says Gaby, "so you aren't talking about yourself after all."

"You asked about your fiancé," he says. "So, I am telling you."

One of her wings flutters against his arm and he stiffens, careful not to make any sudden movements. They are so small and—it would be easy, and horrible, to forget his strength around them. She notices, of course. She notices everything.

"Don't tell me you're one of those," she asks, amused.

"Hm?"

"You believe our wings are manifestations of our souls?"

Illya cannot manage a smile for her. "No. Nothing like that."

She shifts her grip on his arm, fingers teasing the inside of his elbow. "Then you are a man of science and evolution."

"There are some questions we have no need to ask," he says, "and no ability to answer. I don't need to know them to do my job or protect our national interests."

"Then you have no curiosity," Gaby decides, dismissing him in her body language and attention. She surveys the ruins with fiercely disguised wonder, betrayed only by the greed of her perusal. "You're a machine."

Illya feels the pluck of a string deep inside of him, stripped to its last length. But these are the cruelties that he has withstood for decades, minor chips in stone, a drop of rain into a muddied river. "Do you want to know what your wings tell me about you?" he asks, roughly.

She doesn't like that. She pulls away, bones realigned, her gaze swallowed into some overlying shadow.

He looks back. "Nothing," he says, and watches her face change.

 

**ix.**

 

Solo slips into their hotel room after a terse dinner and slow unwinding, and Illya does not have to ask how he has gotten the key and the freedom to wander the hotel, upsetting their mission. These are paths he has already walked in his mind. Instead of reacting to the click of the front door, Illya moves his bishop forward, studying the patchwork of the board.

"Now we can have a party," says Gaby, tipped lazily over the sofa in her new starched pajamas. She lifts the glasses pinched between her fingers. "A drink, Mr. Solo?"

"It would be ill-advised," he says, and then takes the glasses from her with his usual grace. "Scotch, brandy, or wine?"

To Illya, he says, "Again with the sweaters, Peril? I thought Russians were used to the cold." 

Illya shifts a pawn, taking its brother. He doesn't bother to answer.

"He's still sulking," Gaby tells the ceiling.

"Hm," says Solo. He pours them each three fingers of something candied bright—there is not much occasion for Illya to partake without feeling cornered—and claps the glasses together to carry them to the table. He gives Gaby her drink with a flourish. He tries to do the same for Illya.

"No," says Illya.

Solo shakes the glass. "It's rude not to accept a drink from an American."

"How terrible for Americans."

Sighing, Solo eases down on the sofa and downs one glass in perfunctory ease. He takes his time with the second, offering a silent toast to Gaby. She gives him the kind of smile that makes Illya uneasy and unhappy.

"Satisfactory," Gaby announces after she has a taste. "This is much better than the smelly risotto."

Solo's expression is long-suffering, as if dealt a blow. "You'll never let me forget it, will you? You ate the entire plate, you know."

"I needed my energy after you dragged me through half of East Berlin," she says, and they are completely ignoring Illya yet seem entirely aware of him, like two predators creating ever-smaller circles. He rubs his face and tries to focus on the board, berating himself for his paranoia. Neither of them are dangerous enough to pose a threat to someone of Illya's skills.

Their flirtations are—comfortable. His stomach draws in, churning on something. What does it matter? Let them tumble into bed together. Let them spend their passions on a farce.

He reaches for his knight, but someone gets there first.

"Check," says Solo, in the same teasing way he says all things.

Illya is caught off guard. He doesn't startle, but neither does he move, blinking at the halo of butter-yellow lamplight blurring Solo's outline, and the shift of his wings when Solo realizes. "Better?" he asks Illya, but no, it is not. 

 

**x.**

 

He takes the watch from his father’s dresser long after the officers had ransacked their former home, leaving only tatters and worthless items of sentiment. “This belongs to you now,” his mother says, tracing its face.

Illya holds the watch to his ear and closes his eyes. He likes the way the strap holds his pulse together and in place, keeping it from spilling into the streets. He likes that he can hear his father’s methodic movements in it.

He may never see him again. In one night, Illya has all taken from him except his mother and this watch and an old cigar box with a bird of prey carved into its lid. He feels—very little. As if there is a wall separating him from a soundless, reverberating scream trapped in a room he does not dare open.

In time, that scream becomes a back-brace. It supports his spine and keeps Illya standing tall. When he is tired, and hungry, and in pain, Illya can push back on the scream and it puts him on his feet, gives him a boost of sorely needed energy, a target to focus on. Eventually, he recognizes it for his own voice, a hideous mating call in some dark that finds crevices to echo into.

And all the way, time clips along. “You will be the harbinger,” Oleg tells him, not long before his training begins. “Our albatross, set on those who would see Russia sink into disarray. You have a taste for it. There’s something sharp in you.”

Illya considers these words. There is some truth to them, because there are moments when Illya hurts those around him and even himself without meaning to. He wonders if that’s why his wings continue to grow. Perhaps he is meant to be some great and winged calamity torn down from the sky, a sign, an omen, ill-made.

(Such soft things, his mother whispers into his hair, buried in his down. Such soft, lovely things.)


End file.
